Saturday, 12 October 2013

INVENT-10N: A FUNNY OLD WEEK FOR THE SURVEILLANCE DEBATE IN THE UK

Funny old week for the surveillance debate in the UK.

Sir Andrew Parker, the new Head of MI5, gave his first
public speech and used it to rail against the nerve The Guardian newspaper had to release details contained in the US
intelligence files pinched by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The nub of what The
Guardian revealed was that GCHQ (the UK’s surveillance centre) was
operating a system known as Tempora, a secret electronic surveillance program accessing
data carried on transatlantic fibre-optic cables. Apparently the data collected
is immense (21 petabytes a day) this being stored for three days (though
related metadata is stored for thirty days). According to Snowden Tempora had
made the UK into a ‘surveillance superpower’.

Now when I read this I can’t say I was particularly
surprised. To my mind it is obvious that as computers become more powerful,
e-storage becomes cheaper and cheaper and the algorithms manipulating said data
increasingly sophisticated that security services would become more-and-more addicted
to the acquisition, warehousing and analysis of the information flying around
the e-universe. And this would be especially the case in the UK: you have only
to look at how enthusiastically Britain has embraced the CCTV camera (there’s
one for every 14 people!) to see that ours is an e-surveillance paradise. We
love being watched!

Which makes it all the more amusing when the week began with
Chris Huhne, the disgraced former Liberal-Democrat MP, claiming that during his
time in cabinet he was told nothing about GCHQ’s Tempora or the NSA’s PRISM or
about their ‘extraordinary capability to vacuum up and store personal emails,
voice contact, social network activity and even internet searches’. And worse, the
National Security Council (attended by ministers and the heads of the security
services and GCHQ) of which Huhne was a member was never briefed regarding
Tempora. The answer to the question ‘who watches the watchers’ is ‘not Chris
Huhne’.

Anyway, back to Sir Andrew Parker. One of the points he made
in his speech was that, ‘We only apply
intrusive tools and capabilities against terrorists and others threatening
national security. The law requires we only collect and access information that
we really need to perform our functions, in this case tackling the threat of
terrorism’.

The weasel-words here are ‘only apply intrusive tools’.

Sir Andrew went on: ‘In
some quarters there seems to be a vague notion that we monitor everyone and all
their communications, browsing at will through people’s private lives for anything
that looks interesting’. This is, he added ‘utter nonsense’.

So while GCHQ doesn’t monitor and apply intrusive tools to everyone’s
communication there is no denial that they COLLECT such data and run it through
their algorithms checking for any correlations with known badniks. And to make
such correlations GCHQ has to collect (or have access to) ALL the data and that
includes the data held by the banks (including that relating to debit/credit
card transactions), Inland Revenue files, CCTV cameras, medical records (if the
DoH can ever get the thing to work!) etc. etc.

So I think it’s a fair assumption to make that:

1)GCHQ e-intelligence gathering goes far beyond
Tempora;

2)GCHQ will continue to develop its e-intelligence
gathering capability;

3)There ain’t nothing we can do to stop this
happening, MI5 having that wonderful get-out of jail-free card called ‘national
security interests’.

Now the big threat of this isn’t,
as The Guardian and others fret about, the erosion of civil liberties and of
privacy, those are abandoned every time you sign up to FaceBook or begin
Tweeting. No, the real threat is that governments and the digerati (the people
with access to the information held by GCHQ) will use it to begin manipulating
the people of Britain.

About Me

Hi, my name is Rod Rees and I'm a writer of science fiction/fantasy. My first book 'The Demi-Monde: Winter' is due for publishing on Quercus on 6th January 2011. It's being billed as a 'steampunk thriller'. Aside from writing my other ambitions are for my two brilliant daughters to be everything they can be (and that's a lot!)and for my wonderful wife Nelli to be as successful as she deserves to be (her book on glass jewellery making is out in November). I HATE surveillance and the intrusion of the State in our lives. I believe in Kondratieff Cycles and that history beats crystal balls, astrology and tarot all to hell when it comes to predicting the future. I believe there's nothing new in the world, it's all just a re-tread.